As Congress debates nothing less important than the future of the Internet, our nation's leaders are applying all the intellectual rigor you'd expect from a tween selecting a smart phone.

Her primary philosophical considerations are, of course, what will her friends think and what will her parents pay for? And so it goes for the House Judiciary Committee.

A markup session for the controversial Stop Online Piracy Act last week devolved into high school drama, replete with name calling and a stubborn refusal to let the nerds talk. The debate, if you want to call it that, could resume today.

This column has repeatedly pointed out how the bipartisan bill designed to battle Internet piracy undermines critical legal protections that foster online innovation. Even after some recent improvements, it still grants copyright holders enormous power to cut off access or funds to sites they determine are infringing, with too little judicial oversight or due process.

Technical problems

Meanwhile, a growing chorus of Internet infrastructure experts believe that the specific mechanisms for blocking sites - such as inserting false information into the domain name system - could introduce technical problems and security vulnerabilities.

In other words, the bill could chip away at the underpinnings of the most transformative technology and economic force of our age. But you wouldn't sense the weight of these issues by watching the behavior of our elected officials.

Late last week, Reps. Steve King, R-Iowa, Sheila Jackson Lee, D-Texas, and their colleagues managed to grind the session to a halt as they exchanged taunts that boiled down to: You're boring. Yeah, well, you're offensive! Nu uh, you're out of order!

But the charade of an intellectual debate on the subject didn't stop there. It didn't even start there.

Similarly, a major sticking point in the markup session last week was whether the committee should bother to hear from any of the many Internet experts (those "nerds" cited earlier) who could intelligently lay out the security concerns.

Level of ignorance

Rep. Lamar Smith, R-Texas, chairman of the Judiciary Committee and sponsor of the legislation, refused to entertain the idea as he sought to rush the bill onto the floor. Other representatives admitted they didn't understand the technical complexities, but nonetheless felt satisfied with the bill - and apparently their own level of ignorance.

It seems it was enough for them that someone like Motion Picture Association of America Senior Vice President Michael O'Leary said the security concerns were overstated, when he was given a chance to testify. And surely he would know, what with a career spent mostly in government.

Or is it possible that someone like Vint Cerf, considered one of the founding fathers of the Internet, knows a little something worth hearing? He and 82 other "innovators, inventors and engineers" who in various ways helped build the Internet signed a letter strenuously opposing the bill.

"When we designed the Internet the first time, our priorities were reliability, robustness and minimizing central points of failure or control," it read. "We are alarmed that Congress is so close to mandating censorship-compliance as a design requirement for new Internet innovations. This can only damage the security of the network, and give authoritarian governments more power over what their citizens can read and publish."

Late Friday, Smith appeared to reluctantly agree to allow experts to testify, after dozens of amendments and other delays made it clear the bill wouldn't sail through the committee as initially expected.

Questioning methods

Perhaps I'm more dewy-eyed about our political system than I realized, but why wouldn't elected officials at least want to hear what experts have to say on this matter? Even if they're in favor of the ultimate goals of the bill - and no one's out arguing for piracy - couldn't it still be that the methods employed are misguided or dangerous?

It all smacks of the growing strain of anti-intellectualism in this country - and in this Congress. The attitude seems to be: Why would the committee need to hear from any pointy-headed brainiacs about niggling little things like facts and details? Theft is wrong; the media industry says this bill stops theft. Ergo, this bill is right and just.

The real question is, why are the politicians so eager to embrace the media industry's take on this matter?

Here, we come back to our tween picking out that smart phone. In the case of Congress, the media industry seems to be playing the dual roles of influential friend and paying parent. And they're willing to splurge on that shiny new iPhone 4S while the tech industry is only coughing up enough for last year's Android.

The nonpartisan research organization Map Light.org noted that sponsors of the bill have raised four times more money from the media industry than they have from technology sectors: nearly $2 million versus just over $500,000 since the start of the 2010 election cycle.

Aides turn lobbyists

Meanwhile, Politico reported this month that two senior Republican aides who were instrumental in advancing online-piracy bills were just hired by the lobbying firms of the Motion Picture Association and the National Music Publishers' Association. I guess that's what friends are for.

Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., and Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Vista (San Diego County), recently put forth an alternative, the Online Protection and Enforcement of Digital Trade Act. It's designed to narrowly target the blatant infringement by overseas sites that supporters of the Piracy Act have claimed was the sole focus of their bill.

Tech giants' backing

The new bill quickly earned the backing of technology giants strenuously opposed to the original bill, including Google, Facebook, Yahoo, Twitter and others.

"This approach targets foreign rogue sites without inflicting collateral damage on legitimate, law-abiding U.S. Internet companies by bringing well-established international trade remedies to bear on this problem," the companies said in a letter.

But the media industry says it doesn't go far enough.

The proposal "fails to provide an effective way to target foreign rogue websites and goes easy on online piracy and counterfeiting," the motion picture association's O'Leary said in a statement this month. "Hopefully, this draft legislation is not just a delaying tactic to prevent Congress from acting quickly on this serious problem."

Yes, because playing political games when serious issues are at stake would be a horrible thing.